Natural History Museum's Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2013

In May, the seafaring lesser noddies head for land to breed. Their arrival on
the tiny island of Cousine in the Seychelles coincides with peak web size
for the red-legged golden orb-web spiders. The female spiders, which can
grow to the size of a hand, create colossal conjoined webs up to 1.5 metres
in diameter in which the tiny males gather. These are woven from extremely
strong silk and are suspended up to six metres above the ground, high enough
to catch passing bats and birds, though it’s flying insects that the spiders
are after. Noddies regularly fly into the webs. Even if they struggle free,
the silk clogs up their feathers so they can’t fly. This noddy was
exhausted, says Isak, ‘totally still, its fragile wing so fully
stretched that I could see every feather’. The only way to accentuate the female
spider was to crop the wings. And it was only human intervention that saved
the bird. But a stickier threat awaited it on the same island: native
pisonia, or cabbage trees. These are favourite nesting places for lesser
noddies, whose feathers get covered in the trees’ sticky seeds. If the load
is too heavy, they can’t fly, fall to the ground and die. But there is an
ultimate twist to the story: the corpses provide compost for the seeds,
which give rise to new nesting places for future generations of noddies.